Conducting Research

Introduction

Before we were allowed to get started on designing the game, we were tasked with conducting research for the design challenge presented to us. My research was on the topic of Doomscrolling which overall was not a difficult to research as it is a term that came into recent creation. Despite being created around the time of the racial injustice and police brutality events in America, it has gained more traction during the pandemic as more people were forced to be indoors and thus would be online more. My goal mainly was to see if I could find concrete information about how it affected individuals age 20 to 30 with anxiety and or depression.

What were my findings?

The articles and journals that I was able to collect were a good mix of personal anecdotes about how doomscrolling affected them and those around them as well as articles that focused on the psychological long term reactions to it. Seeing as my focus was on how doomscrolling affected anxiety in the age range of 20s-30s individuals, finding those more personal standpoint journals were what I sought out more after a while. It allowed for me, who personally avoids the action, to see why someone would find themselves stuck in an endless loop of searching out bad news to consume. The consensus being that there was an ever growing flow of new information and facts that kept upping the bad news from the day before. This question only increased the more I found articles that spoke about their experiences with doomscrolling.

It wasn’t until I had started to look into the more scientific articles that I was seeing additional reasoning beyond it being strictly because of society’s increased focus on social media for news. There is in fact a ‘natural’ part of the human psyche that seeks out negative news/information as a way to know and be prepared for danger. A feeling that rings true within the two years of the pandemic where there were constant updates about how the virus was travelling, who it was affecting and the death rates. It wasn’t all doom related in the research though as many of the authors touched upon ways to step away from doomscrolling, most relating to either positive outlook or seeking out external sources (hobbies, tasks and friends).

So, overall I found the research process to be rather insightful and strangely hopeful overall despite the focus on the doom. It is a stranger balancing act to what to engage in actively knowing about the state of the world around you and knowing when to step away for your mental health. Some are able to with ease while others may find it harder to not be up at 3am reading about the new variant, death tolls or how vaccinated vs unvaccinated percentages. I don’t forsee doomscrolling lessening over the years but hopefully with the research I can make a game that touches upon the negative factors that come from the constant swiping and how to realize when it’s time to stop.